All the armies had crossed the Rhine before the end of March. On the 28th
Eisenhower set Ninth Army on the north, and First and Third Armies, on the
south, moving to snare the Ruhr in a sweeping envelopment that would reach east
120 miles to the Weser River. Later in the day, in a cable addressed "Personal
to Marshal Stalin," Eisenhower told the Russians, as he had already informed the
British and U.S. Chiefs of Staff, that he proposed to close an encirclement of
the Ruhr in the vicinity of Kassel and then turn the armies east to meet the
Russians, probably in the Leipzig-Dresden area. Subsequently, to keep the
Germans from setting up a redoubt in the Bavarian and Austrian mountains, he
would send forces south to link up with the Russians on the Danube between
Regensburg and Linz.

Having lost the West Wall and having failed to hold on the Rhine, the German
armies, reinforced by over-age and underage Volkssturm men, were nothing like
the opponents they had been even a few weeks earlier. On the southern arm of the
encirclement, First and Third Armies were already halfway between the Rhine and
the Weser by nightfall on the 28th. Ninth Army drove east and south, met the
First Army point at Lippstadt on 1 April, and closed the noose tightly around
German Army Group B in the Ruhr the next day.1

The two PWD captains, Gittler and Padover, followed behind Ninth Army and
described the scene:

The traffic keeps going endlessly to the east. Streaming back are the huge
COM Z trucks bearing the prisoners. They smile, wave, stare with awe at the busy
Americans building bridges, patching roads, unloading, loading, bearing forward.
You can stand on an intersection and count the prisoners by the thousands. When
they look at the ruined towns where there had been resistance, they just stare
and shake their heads.
Past the main cities of resistance, past the broken roads and shattered
farmhouses and torn-up fields, we suddenly come upon towns that stand intact and
fields that are green and farmers who are at their job working. There was no
fighting in these areas, and the people have profited. Then in the open country
behind Muenster and south to Paderborn, you see thousands and thousands of
liberated foreign workers and prisoners of war from every army in Europe.
Mingling with them are German workers walking back home from the Ruhr. This is
the great migration. When you talk with them you see the senseless, desperate
measures the Nazis took to transport labor back and forth across the land during
the last six weeks.
In Lippe, where the Germans were surprised and surrendered by the thousands,
the ancient picturesque beauty of the towns and countryside is preserved. The
towns operate normally ; the fields are rich with cattle. The farms and houses
stand as before. Rarely do you see American soldiers in these towns.
Nevertheless, there is order and tranquility, even without German or Allied
authority.

[225]

Allied proclamations, however, are posted in every village all the way up to
the most forward lines. German children wave as you pass by and the old people
smile. Everyone falls over himself to give you help and information and
directions.
From Lippe you suddenly come to Paderborn. And again appear the familiar
ruins and broken life; people searching in the rubble for some trinket or
possession. Here there had been resistance and the city had paid for it. We
talked to a saddlemaker who was trying to clear away the debris around his
business. He is angry and apologetic. "We should have used our hunting guns on
the Nazi Lieter," he says. "Then this would not have occurred and we
would have saved something."
2

Had death not all too often still been waiting around the next corner, the
war would have been little more than a sour joke by April 1945. At Arolsen, when
an SS officer candidate school pulled out the day before the Americans came, the
people hurried to fill in the antitank ditches around the town. The 9th Panzer
Division troops detailed to defend Olpe drove themselves to a prisoner of war
cage in their own trucks.3In one small town, a military government public
safety officer, called to quell a disturbance, found a displaced person beating
a German over the head with a yard-square, framed picture of Der Fuehrer.4When
ECAD Tech. 4 Kenneth Dennis found himself the only American in a German town, he
commandeered a bicycle from a rack in front of a cafe and rode down the street
shouting: "Achtung. Amerikanische Bomben." While the Germans,
including three officers whom he saluted out of habit, scrambled for cover, he
pedaled through town and back to the American line.5

Third Army's 5th Division captured Frankfurt on 29 March. Caught in a
narrowing pocket between First Army on the north and Third Army on the south and
east, the people had known what was coming for nearly a week. The Gauleiter
ordered the men to leave the city on the 24th. Some did; many did not,
preferring to wait out the end in the cellars and air raid bunkers. The next day
was Palm Sunday. On Monday artillery shells began to fall in the city, and at
night, when the firing subsided, the roar and rattling of American tanks carried
across the Main River from the south. The weather was fine, more like May than
March. The city went on a spree as looters plundered the property of those who
had left. The shopkeepers tried to sell out their stocks. Butter, scarce since
before the war, could be bought by the case and wine sometimes by the bucketful,
and the butchers gave out four or five times the legal meat ration. On Thursday
the Americans came: the scouts and skirmishers first, keeping under cover close
to buildings and behind the rubble piles lining the streets; and then the
columns with rifles slung on their shoulders.6

The war was over for Frankfurt. After twenty air raids, the bombing was
ended. The sirens would not be heard again, nor the antiaircraft guns. But the
city was all but dead. The business district was a brick and stone wilderness in
which the old residents could hardly find their way around. No trains were
running and no streetcars.

[226]

US TANK CRASHES THROUGH RUINS OF A GERMAN TOWN

The telephones were out, and the electric lines and water and gas mains would
take months to repair. The Chief Military Government Officer, Lt. Col. Howard D.
Criswell, Detachment F2D2, found a non-Nazi former editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Wilhelm Hollbach, and had him sworn in as
Oberbuergermeister. In the
railroad yards, Germans and displaced persons raided stranded Wehrmacht supply
trains, and seventy Russians died from drinking methyl alcohol taken in a raid.
Of the 31,000 Jews who had inhabited Frankfurt, one of the oldest Jewish
communities in Germany, military government officers found 140. They had been
employed under the Nazis in cemeteries and at cleaning toilets. Living in
segregated houses, one family to a room, they had in the past three years not
received any egg, meat, milk, white flour, wine, tobacco, or clothing rations.
Military government requisitioned houses and a hospital for them.7

On the edge of the Grueneburg Park in Frankfurt stood a marvel, a spacious
high-rise office building belonging to the I. G. Farben cartel, untouched by
bombs and

[227]

with hardly even a window broken. It seemed likely to be the only building
big enough to house SHAEF (and USFET) left standing in western Germany, and
Smith cabled Washington to make sure that Frankfurt, which might be considered
for assignment to the French zone, was kept in the US zone.8The Germans later suspected that the US Air Force had spared the building
deliberately. More likely, the antiaircraft batteries in the Grueneburg Park
and the adjacent Palm Garden had influenced the bomber pilots to pick less hazardous
targets.

Advancing north from Frankfurt, Third Army cut into the future Soviet zone
when it occupied the western tip of Thuringia. On 4 April, the 90th Infantry
Division took Merkers, a few miles inside the border in Thuringia. On the
morning of the 6th, two military policemen, Pfc. Clyde Harmon and Pfc. Anthony
Kline, enforcing the customary orders against civilian circulation, stopped two
women on a road outside Merkers. Since both were French displaced persons and
one was pregnant, the MPs decided rather than to arrest them to escort them back
into the town. On the way, as they passed the entrance to the Kaiseroda salt
mine in Merkers, the women talked about gold that the Germans had stored in the
mine-so much gold, they said, that unloading it had taken local civilians and
displaced persons who were used as labor seventy-two hours. By noon the story
had passed from the MP first sergeant to the chief of staff and on to the
division's G-5 officer, Lt. Col. William A. Russell, who in a few hours had the
news confirmed by other DPs and by a British sergeant who had been employed in
the mine as a prisoner of war and had helped unload the gold. Russell also turned up an
assistant director of the National Galleries in Berlin who admitted he was in
Merkers to care for paintings stored in the mine. The gold was reportedly the
entire reserve of the Reichsbank in Berlin, which had moved it to the mine after
the bank building was bombed out in February 1945. When Russell learned that the
mine had thirty miles of galleries and five entrances, the division, which had
already detailed the 712th Tank Battalion to guard the Merkers entrance, had to
divert the whole 357th Infantry Regiment to guard the other four.

The next morning, after having steam raised in the boilers overnight to
generate electricity for the lifts and ventilators, Russell went down into the
mine with a party of division officers, German mine officials, and Signal Corps
photographers. Near the entrance to the main passageway they found 550 bags
containing a half billion in paper Reichsmarks.9A steel vault door

[228]

SOLDIERS ADMIRE MANET PAINTING IN MERKERS MINE

on the entrance to the tunnel said to contain the gold was locked. In the
afternoon, after having tried unsuccessfully to open the door, the party left
the mine without having seen the treasure.

The next day was Sunday. In the morning, while Colonel Bernstein, Deputy
Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, SHAEF, read about the find in the New York
Herald Tribune's Paris edition, 90th Infantry Division engineers blasted a hole
in the vault wall to reveal on the other side a room 75 feet wide and 150 feet
deep. The floor was covered with rows of numbered hags, over 7,000 in all, each
containing gold bars or gold coins. Baled paper money was stacked along one wall; and at the hack-a
mute reminder of nazism's victims-valises were piled filled with gold and silver
tooth fillings, eyeglass frames, watch cases, wedding rings, pearls, and
precious stones. The gold, between 55 and 81 pounds to the hag, amounted to
nearly 250 tons. In paper money, all the European currencies were represented.
The largest amounts were 98 million French francs and 2.7 billion Reichsmarks.
The treasure almost made the 400 tons of art work, the pest pieces from the
Berlin museums, stacked in the mine's other passages seem like a routine find.

[229]

On Sunday afternoon, Bernstein, after checking the newspaper
story with Lt. Col. R. Tupper Barrett, Chief, Financial Branch, G-5, 12th Army Group, flew to
SHAEF Forward at Rheims where he spent the night, it being too late by then to
fly into Germany. At noon on Monday, he arrived at Gen. George S. Patton's Third
Army Headquarters with instructions from Eisenhower to check the contents of the
mine and arrange to have the treasure taken away. While he was there, orders
arrived for him to locate a depository farther back in the SHAEF zone and
supervise the moving. Bernstein and Barrett spent Tuesday looking for a site and
finally settled on the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt. Wednesday, at Merkers,
they planned the move and prepared for distinguished visitors by having Germans
tune up the mine machinery. The next morning, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and
Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy took the 1,600-foot ride down into the mine. When they
stepped out at the foot of the shaft, the private on guard saluted and, in the
underground stillness, was heard by all to mutter, "Jesus Christ !"

The move began at 0900 on Saturday morning, 14 April. In twenty hours, the
gold and currency and a few cases of art work were loaded on thirty ten-ton
trucks, each with a 10 percent overload. Down in the mine, jeeps with trailers
hauled the treasure from the vault to the shaft, where the loaded trailers were
put aboard the lifts and brought to the surface. At the vault entrance an
officer registered each bag or item on a load slip, and at the truck ramps an
officer and an enlisted man checked the load slips and verified that every item
that left the vault was loaded on a truck. Finally, the officer recorded the
truck number and the names and serial numbers of the driver, the assistant driver, and the guards assigned to the truck.

The convoy left Merkers on Sunday morning for the 85-mile
trip to Frankfurt with an escort of five rifle platoons, two machine gun
platoons, ten multiple-mount antiaircraft vehicles, and Piper cub and fighter
air cover. All this protection, however, was not enough to prevent a rumor,
which surfaced periodically for years after, that one truckload of gold (or art
work) disappeared on the way to Frankfurt. On Sunday afternoon and throughout
the night the trucks were unloaded in Frankfurt, each item being checked against
the load lists as it came off a truck and again when it was moved into the Reichsbank vault. Two infantry companies cordoned off' the area during the
unloading.10

The same procedures, except that a hundred German prisoners of war did the
work, were followed in loading the art objects aboard a second truck convoy on
Monday, and a similar security guard escorted the trucks to Frankfurt the next
day. After the main treasure was removed, the mine was still a grab bag of
valuables. Reconnaissance of the other entrances had turned up four hundred tons
of German patent office records, Luftwaffe material and ammunition, German Army
High

[230]

Command records, libraries and city archives (including 2 million books from
Berlin and the Goethe collection from Weimar) , and the files of the Krupp,
Henschel, and other companies. The patent records in particular were potentially
as valuable as the gold; but Third Army needed its trucks, and Bernstein had to
settle, on 21 April, for a small seven-truck convoy to move the cream of the
patent records, samples of the Krupp and Henschel files, and several dozen high
quality microscopes.

Leads found in the Reichsbank records at Merkers also helped uncover
a dozen other treasure caches in places occupied by US forces that brought into
the vault in Frankfurt hundreds more gold and silver bars, some platinum, rhodium,
and palladium, a quarter of a million in US gold dollars (the Merkers mine set
the record, however, containing 711 bags of US $20 gold pieces, $25,000 to the
bag), a million Swiss (old francs, and a billion French francs.11

The front moved on; the troops read about the treasure in Stars and Stripes
or Yank and probably only vaguely remembered they had been in~ or near Merkers.
Another spot was more likely to stick in the memories of those who passed
through it in early April 1945. On the 6th, the 4th Armored division took Ohrdruf, thirty miles east of Merkers, a small city hardly touched
by the war. Atop a hill on the outskirts stood a row of empty stone SS
barracks. On a nearly hill was a cluster of low, dirty, and weather-beaten
wooden buildings. This was Ohrdruf-Nord, work camp for the Buchenwald
concentration camp. When the troops entered, they found twenty-nine bodies on
the ground in front of the administration building. A short distance away was a
gallows and not far beyond it a shed in which fifty-two naked bodies were
stacked in tiers of four, covered with what appeared to be powdered lime. They
apparently had been awaiting transportation to pits in the forest where between
two and three thousand others had been buried during the six months the camp had
existed. Most had died of disease, but most also had marks on their faces and
heads and bruises on their bodies. A third group, nine charred torsos, lay among
ashes under a rough incinerator made of railroad ties and rails. 'Those in front
of the administration building were the most recently dead-all shot in the lack
of the neck.

Ohrdruf-Nord was not a proper concentration camp. It had no gas chamber or
high-performance crematorium. The deaths there were caused by disease and
neglect, helped along by overwork and brutality. The inmates had been employed
at digging a tunnel, probably as a site for an underground factory. A thousand
had been there a week before the Americans came. In the succeeding days the
guards had marched those who could walk away to the east. At noon on the 6th two
busses had come to take out the bedridden sick. By then American artillery fire
could be heard coming close, and the commandant lost his nerve, sent the busses
away empty, and shot the prisoners with his pistol. A dozen men had hidden in
the camp buildings and survived to tell about the last days

[231]

at Ohrdruf-Nord and to identify the dead, among whom was an American pilot
who had been imprisoned there after being shot down nearby and had contracted
typhus.

Among the first persons that Lt. Col. James H. Van Wagenen, the 4th Armored's
military government officer, took on a tour of the camp was Albert Schneider,
Buergermeister of Ohrdruf. Schneider had been a party member since 1933, but he
had also been an honest and conscientious mayor, and he had not skipped town
ahead of the Americans as other Nazi officials were doing. He was shocked by
what he saw. Admitting there had been rumors in the town, he claimed simply not
to have believed Germans capable of such atrocities. On Van Wagenen's orders, he
agreed to summon twenty-five prominent men and women who were to be taken to
view the camp the next morning. In the morning, a soldier who had been sent to
fetch him after he failed to appear at the stated time found him and his wife
dead in their bedroom, their wrists slashed. G-2 investigators concluded the
Schneiders' suicides were motivated by sincere shock and regret over what had
happened in their town. One of the most frustrating psychological problems of
the early occupation was going to be how to make the German people realize the
horror of the concentration camps. In Ohrdruf, however, after the Schneider's'
suicides and after others had been taken to see the camp, the citizens seemed to
be convinced.12

The closing of the Ruhr pocket in the first week of April opened a
125-mile-wide hole in the center of the German front. General Field Marshall Walter Model's
Army Group B, the 400,000 troops who should have been there, were locked in the
pocket and hardly counted anymore in Bradley's decision to send his three
armies' main forces racing eastward into the gap. By the week's end, Ninth and
First Armies were heading across the Weser River toward Magdeburg and Leipzig.
Third Army, already somewhat farther east, waited for the other two to come
abreast before beginning its drive toward Chemnitz and Dresden.

V Corps jumped off from Kassel on 5 April. Like Aachen and Cologne before it,
the heart of the city was bombed out. Among the ruins, the remaining 30,000
inhabitants of what had been a quarter million population rummaged for lost
belongings, their own or other people's, or waited passively for what would come
next. Four days later and twenty-five miles farther east, V Corps took
Goettingen. Except for some bomb damage in the railroad yards and to the power
plant, the war had not touched the city. The Buergermeister performed a formal
and quite unnecessary surrender on the city hall steps. The only German troops
in town were 10,000 hospitalized sick and wounded. An attempt to mobilize the
local Volkssturm had collapsed several days before when the city commandant
called such a move crazy, after learning that the men had only had ten days'
training in the past six months. Swollen by refugees from Kassel and Berlin, the
population was up to 70,000 from its normal 50,000 inhabitants. The University
of Goettingen was open and holding some classes, until G-5, V Corps, ordered it
closed in compliance with SHAEF's standing orders.

The only recorded exchange of fire in Goettingen was not between Americans

[232]

TROOPS ADVANCE: THROUGH SURRENDERED TOWN

and Germans but between a German general and the Gestapo. General der
Infanterie Friedrich Hossbach, once Hitler's adjutant but recently dismissed
under a cloud for having attempted to order a breakout from East Prussia, was
under treatment in the university clinic for an ear infection. Illnesses that
needed to be treated in out-of-the-way places were common among German generals
in those days, but Hossbach had not been forgotten. An hour before the Americans
arrived, an SS major, a uniformed policeman, and two men in civilian clothes
rang the doorbell of his house. Warned by friends to expect the Gestapo, Hossbach
ran out on an upstairs balcony and engaged his callers in a pistol duel until
they -obviously pressed for time- ran to a car they had parked at the corner
and drove off. The Americans were rather pleased to have turned up a general who
had been against Hitler, not so pleased when they discovered he was "a Prussian
of the old school" who despised the democracy Germany had under the Weimar
Republic. Nevertheless they decided to let him keep his pistol for the time
being in case his visitors returned.13

[233]

GERMANS DIG GRAVES for concentration camp victims at Nordhausen.

Nordhausen, on the edge of the Harz Mountains, is thirty-eight miles east and
south of Goettingen. First Army's VII Corps, moving fast, took the town on 11
April. Again the Americans were astonished and shaken by what they uncovered: a concentration camp with 3,000 rotting, unburied bodies and 2,000 survivors
all sick and nearly all in the last stages of starvation; a slave labor camp;
two complete underground factories; and a treasure mine with unusual contents. The corps G-5 rounded up several hundred German
civilians to bury the dead in the concentration camp and evicted several hundred
others from their homes in the town to provide accommodations for the survivors.
The 23,000 displaced persons and prisoners of war in the slave labor camp had
been employed in the Mittelwerk, one of the underground factories. In the last
months they had been dying at the rate of 150 a week; and 9,000 were sick, 1,000
with tuberculosis. The Nordwerk, the other factory, was an assembly plant for
jet aircraft engines. The Mittelwerk had all the equipment

[234]

ENTRANCE TO NORDHAUSEN V-2 PLANT

needed to manufacture V-2 rockets, from the components to the completed
projectile, and the Germans had left behind enough finished parts to make 250
rockets. The Berntrode Mine, outside Nordhausen, contained the remains of
Frederick the Great, Frederick William I of Prussia, and Paul yon Hindenburg and
his wife; the Prussian royal regalia, scepter, orb, crowns, helmet, broadsword,
and seal; over two hundred regimental standards; the lest hooks from the
Prussian royal library ; several dozen palace tapestries; and 271 paintings, all
valuable, among them several by Lucas Cranach. The MFA&A officers could find only one defect in the mine as a storage place: although it was dry and had
a constant temperature, it had been used since 1937 to house a munitions factory
and still held 400,000 tons of ammunition, some of it in highly doubtful
condition.
14

Between Goettingen and Nordhausen, First Army had crossed into the future
Soviet zone, as Ninth Army also did at the

[235]

same time on its drive to Magdeburg. The military government carpet had been
getting thinner since the beginning of the month because it had been stretched
east and north at the same time that the pinpoint locations in the south were
being uncovered. When they entered the Soviet zone, the armies ran completely
out of trained detachments, and from the zone border west to the Rhine they
could not achieve even the planned minimum of one I detachment for every two
Landkreise. ECAD had begun training its officer overstrength, but the first
hundred would not be available until the third week in April, and the last
hundred not until late May. The armies resorted to provisional detachments and
drew the personnel from their own tactical troops. Ninth Army set up the Ninth
Army Military Government Unit, modeled on an ECAD regiment, with 3 companies, 49
detachments, and 900 officers and men. The detachments trained for two weeks.
First Army put a thousand officers and men into fifty-two provisional
detachments, two more than the total of its regular military government
detachments, and assigned one trained ECAD officer to each provisional
detachment. Third Army's three corps used antiaircraft, field artillery, and
signal troops to put together a dozen detachments apiece, and the army G-5 ran
fifty officers through "Charlottesville in three days" in Frankfurt. In all
armies, the corps and division G-5 staffs took over detachment functions. The
80th Infantry Division G-5, for instance, in mid-April conducted military
government in Erfurt, Weimar, Jena, and Gera.15

A 4th Armored Division tank column heading east past Weimar on 11 April
encountered one of the strangest sights of the war. Two PWD observers, 1st Lt.
Edward A. Tennenbaum and Egon W. Fleck, a civilian, described what they saw.

[We] turned a corner onto a main highway and saw thousands of ragged, hungry
looking men marching in orderly formation, marching east. The men were armed and
had leaders at their sides. Some platoons carried rifles. Some platoons had
Panzerfausts on their shoulders. Some carried hand grenades. They laughed and
waved wildly as they walked. Their captains saluted gravely for them. They were
of many nationalities, a platoon of French followed by a platoon of
Spaniards-platoons of Russians, Poles, Jews, Dutch. Some wore striped convict
suits, some ragged U.N. uniforms, some shreds of civilian clothes. These were
the inmates of Buchenwald walking to war as tanks roared by at twenty-five miles
per hour.16

The tank officers ordered the marchers to turn back, and Fleck and Tennenbaum
left the column to have a look at the camp. There they found another fantastic
scene. Armed inmates stood guard at the main gate, a two-story, wooden structure
bearing in large letters across the entrance the motto "Recht oder Unrecht, mein
Vaterland" (Right or wrong, my Fatherland) . Inside, wildly cheering prisoners
rushed to shake their hands. Others were busy throwing binoculars manufactured
in the camp shops over the barbed wire fence to troops passing by outside. Armed
guards in prison clothes patrolled the grounds, and a few words from them were
enough to quiet the excited crowds. The Americans noticed at once that the
guards looked healthier than the others and later learned why : they were mostly
German communists who had sur-

[236]

SURVIVORS OF BUCHENWALD

vived by helping the SS manage the camp as they were now helping the
Americans.

Opened in 1937, Buchenwald was a camp with a history reaching lack into the
prewar Nazi era. Inside one building, Fleck and Tennenbaum saw a thousand sealed
tin cans containing the unclaimed ashes of prisoners who had died in the 1930s.
Such niceties had long ago stopped being observed. In the SS offices and
quarters they saw lamp shades, bookends, and other bric-a-brac decorated with
tanned, tattooed human skin, products of one of the hobbies of former commandant
Karl Koch's wife. The Koch regime, which ended in 1943, had been the most bestial. Since then the camp had been run to get maximum
work from the prisoners with minimum food and maintenance. At the end the death
rate was about two hundred prisoners a day; but the 50,000 who died there in the
eight years before 1945 were not enough to rank Buchenwald with Auschwitz or the
other extermination camps.

In appearance Buchenwald was everything, and more, that the Americans had
imagined a concentration camp to be. An immense barbed wire fence, screened on
the outside by a dense pine forest, enclosed the rows of one-story hutments of
the main

[237]

camp and the twenty-seven low, wooden barns encircled by barbed wire that
were known as the little camp. The "little camp" was the quarantine station for
new prisoners, permanent quarters for Jews, and the assembly area for transports
to the death camps. Tennenbaum and Fleck noticed when they arrived that the
gates to this section were closed and guarded. The "aristocrats" in the main
camp did not allow the little camp to join their freedom celebration. To the
right of the main gate, off the edge of the parade ground where the prisoners
(as many as 90,000 in 1944) had stood for morning and evening roll call, was the
crematorium, separately enclosed by a high board fence. The incinerator, a model
of technical efficiency, could reduce a "charge," eighteen bodies, to ashes in
about twenty minutes. The basement housed the furnace and the "strangling room,"
a novel installation even in the macabre world of concentration camps. At ground
level, condemned prisoners were hurried through a door into a short, narrow
corridor with a four-by-four-foot opening in the floor at the far end. Through
the opening they fell thirteen feet to the concrete basement floor where, if the
fall did not kill them as it often did not, SS men garroted them and hung the
bodies on hooks along the wall until the incinerator crew was ready for them
upstairs. The crematorium had been shut down for a time in March, when the coal
supply ran out, but had been running again in April. The SS guards had not had
time to clean up the evidence before they fled the camp on the 10th, and they
left behind a truckload of naked corpses in the yard and unconsumed bones and
skulls on the incinerator grates.

There were 21,000 prisoners in Buchenwald at the liberation,
about half the number that had been there a week earlier. The SS had marched the others east,
toward Leipzig. U.S. fighter planes were keeping the columns in view but could
not fire without endangering prisoners.

The 12th Army Group had assigned responsibility for the concentration camps
to the Displaced Persons Executive (DPX) , and on the day after liberation 1st
Lt. Walter F. Emmons, commanding DP Detachment 10, took charge in Buchenwald. He
had food and clothing brought in from German stocks in Weimar and Jena and set
up an emergency hospital in the SS barracks, where inmate physicians gave
seventy blood transfusions from the American blood bank the first day. On the
fourth and fifth days, to reduce the death rate, which was far less than before
but was still about twenty a day, the 66th Medical Battalion and a complete
500-bed evacuation hospital came in with enough medical supplies to treat the
5,000 cases needing immediate attention. By then 700 cases had been treated, and
Germans had been put to work improving the sanitation.

A particular problem for Emmons and his detachment was the multitude of
visitors that descended upon them and their charges. The tactical troops, as
always, moved on quickly, but after them came newspaper reporters and visitors
from other headquarters and from Allied governments and armies. Buchenwald had
been an international camp, and among the thirty-one nationalities represented
there were men prominent in various fields in their own countries. The
prisoners' desire to be away from the place and the visitors' eagerness to do
something for them resulted in numerous unauthorized departures; before long,
reports were coming back of cases in which former inmates died before reaching
home. Finally, 12th Army Group had to

[238]

prohibit visits to liberated concentration camps without
approval of the army commanders.17

In the second week of April the dam broke. Until then, the Germans had herded
as many displaced persons and prisoners of war as they could eastward, as they
had done earlier in the Rhineland. Between the Weser and the Elbe they ran out
of space. The Soviet advance to the Oder River had also raised a wave of
refugees, prisoners of war, and displaced persons that had filled central
Germany and was continuing westward. Ninth Army encountered columns of American
and British prisoners who had been on the road since January, first marching
west from camps in Poland and then recently headed east again. The other RAMPs
(recovered Allied military personnel) were mostly mixed with the civilian DPs,
both groups having been used as ordinary industrial and farm labor.18

Maj. Philip Shafer, head of the DPX, Third Army, had one officer and two
enlisted men under him on 1 April. In the field he had twelve DP detachments
(eighty-seven officers and men); thirteen French Mission Militaire Liaison
Administrative (MMLA) welfare teams, each with one officer, a male driver, and
two or three enlisted women; and a scattering of French, Belgian, Dutch, and
Polish liaison and medical officers. Totaling 230 individuals, they were soon
having to deal with 1,500 times their own number of DPs and RAMPS. A dozen UNRRA teams and eleven
emergency DP detachments added during the month were barely enough to keep the
ratio from going higher.19The armies formed fifty-one DP detachments, received
forty-three UNRRA teams and a like number of MMLA teams, and still had to divert
tactical units ranging up to the size of a division (the whole 29th Infantry
Division for instance) to DPX duties. By 16 April they had uncovered a million
DPs, and they would pass their second million before the month was out. Ninth
Army issued 200,000 rations a day; First Army, over a million a week. The food
came mostly from captured stocks, but First Army also requisitioned 20,000 tons
of imported military government relief supplies. Ninth Army used four
seven-story buildings in a former German Army complex near Muenster as its
supply center. The 12th Army Group reported 350 camps established with
capacities between 3,000 and 30,000 persons.20

As had happened in the Rhineland,
the DPs' first impulse was to get away from where they were; and once they did,
they seemed beset with the desire to keep moving. The former prisoners of war,
especially the French and Belgians, who remembered the lessons of 1940, kept off
the roads. To reduce the flow of the others, the armies set up checkpoints and
patrols on the main roads and had them turn over the DPs to the nearest village
Buergermeister with orders to house and feed them from local resources. The
rivers, from the Rhine eastward, helped somewhat to keep the DPs' wanderings
compartmentalized.

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Expecting that they could be started on their way home soon after a junction
with the Soviet forces was made, the DPX wanted to hold the eastern Europeans as
far east as possible. The French, Belgians, and Dutch were repatriated as fast
as transportation could be found, as many as 5,000 a day from each of the armies
(46,000 from Ninth Army in April and 74,000 from Third Army) . When, as the
front advanced to the east, the armies were less and less able to spare their
own trucks to haul the DPs back to the railroads, the DPX secured fifty French
truck companies to keep the repatriates moving; and on 11 April, Third Army
began a westbound DP airlift from Frankfurt.

The psychology and behavior of the DPs, if no longer a shock, were as much a
puzzle and a problem as they had been in the Rhineland. The PWD observers again
were the least alarmed. Padover and Gittler reported:

On the German highways and byways one sees a veritable Voelkerwanderung-thousands,
tens of thousands of men, in small groups and large, carrying bundles, carrying
suitcases strapped to their backs, carrying bulging handbags, are marching east
and marching west. Many wear shabby green uniforms-they are Red Army PWs.
Frenchmen and Belgians also still wear their old army uniforms, now almost in
tatters. Poles and Dutchmen and Serbs wear any kind of rags. Their German
masters had not kept them in clothes. They were surprisingly cheerful,
surprisingly orderly.
Now they all march . . . in the direction of home. Occasionally they help
themselves to chickens or loaves of bread or a pair of pants, but they are
orderly and obedient, even the French. There seems to be no vengeance in these
people, no lust for destruction, no desire to make the Germans pay for what they
have done to them, to their countries.
There is much talk about looting. German farmers say the Eastern workers are
stealing their chickens. German workers say that the Russians are breaking into
homes and helping themselves to necessities. German middle class people say
that Russians are animals. The truth is that the Eastern workers are astonishingly
well-behaved.21

On the other hand, in half the military government court cases tried in the
Ninth Army area during April, the accused were DPs. Looting often declined
dramatically in the vicinity of tightly controlled camps, but not all the DPs
wanted to live in the camps. Some preferred to experience their new found
freedom to the fullest. Others were not exactly the innocent victims of nazism
that the Americans presumed them to be and did not want to risk being
recognized. Many wandered cross-country or along back roads living on what they
could beg or steal. Sometimes they formed armed gangs of thirty or forty men and
turned to outright banditry. Such groups would not hesitate to skirmish with
patrols sent to flush them out, and on at least one occasion AWOL U.S. soldiers
were caught with them. The military government reports agree, however, that the
DPs, including the most restless and unruly among them, were completely friendly
to Americans and that the trouble they caused was vastly less than it might have
been had they chosen to use the power inherent in their numbers to take
organized vengeance on the Germans.

Among the DPs, the former prisoners of war were usually the easiest to
handle. They knew the necessity for discipline and, after years in captivity,
wanted to refurbish their self-esteem by contributing to the victory. In the
camps and assembly centers, the French usually were quick to establish order
among themselves. The Russians were less ready to organize independently,

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and the camp detachments often had to call on the Soviet liaison officers, as
Detachment H1G3 did in the following:

5 April 1945Col. Niccolai Lischnevsky of the Russian Army visited the camp on an inspection
tour and was advised by Maj. [George B.] Mehlman that the Russian leader was
very conscientious and hard working but that he lacked the ability to obtain
obedience or discipline from the Russian group. Maj. Mehlman requested the Russian
colonel to appoint a new leader and vest in him the authority of his office.
Col. Lischnevsky ordered that all the Russians be assembled in one group in
order that he might speak to them. When they had been assembled, the colonel
harangued them at length on the fact that they were being placed under the protection
of the US military and that he was directly ordering them to obey all orders
given them and that he was going to appoint new leaders and establish within
the Russian group regular Russian Army discipline and that he was forming battalions,
companies, and squads and that discipline and obedience must be rigidly enforced.
Col. Lischnevsky ordered all the former Russian Army officers and NCOs to fall
in, dismissing the rest. He personally interviewed and selected from the group
of former Russian officers a new Russian leader and staff", battalion commanders,
company commanders, company officers and NCOs.22

The detachments learned early that the Russians and other
eastern Europeans were frequently quite willing to settle down to the good life
in camps that offered welfare programs and luxuries, particularly liquor and
radios. The trouble was that their expectations escalated rapidly, and their
demands kept increasing. Since the luxuries had to come from the Germans, limits
were soon reached. During the month, First Army provided each of its DP
detachments with a security guard detail, which was by far the most effective,
if not the most desirable, means of DP control.23

While the DP flood had come later than expected, that of the surrendering German
troops came earlier. The plans had anticipated US prisoner of war holdings to
reach about 900,000 by 30 June 1945. On 15 April 1.3 million prisoners were
in US hands. Another 600,000 captures were expected in the next two weeks and
at least that many more in May. Legally they were all entitled to the basic
rations and quarters furnished to US troops of the same rank. In fact, however,
SHAEF had never contemplated extending such treatment to so many German soldiers.
Expecting the big wave of prisoners to come with the surrender or collapse,
SHAEF proposed to take advantage of the EAC surrender provisions and create
the category "disarmed German troops," which would make the bulk of
the Wehrmacht a German responsibility pending disbandment. In April,
however, the war was still on; American prisoners were still in German hands;
and 30,000 Germans were already surrendering every day. By mid-April, SHAEF
had allocated 50 US officers, 4,000 enlisted men, and 13 antiaircraft battalions
to prisoner of war guard duty. Just west of the Rhine, 12th Army Group was seating
up four huge enclosures which could hold 50,000 men each but which would not
have shelters "or other comforts" until the prisoners themselves built
them from local materials.
24

[241]

CAPTURED GERMANS IN AN IMPROVISED STOCKADE

On April 15, Lt. Col. F. Van Wyck Mason, SHAEF G-5 historian, and Capt. Jesse
C. Beesley, civil affairs historian for the Communications Zone, set out from
Luxembourg in a recon car to follow the route Third Army had taken into Germany.
For Mason the "first point of interest" was Bad Kreuznach, twenty miles west of
the Rhine crossing at Mainz. As he described it:

The military government detachment commander had his largest attacks not from
the local population, but from the demands of the high brass in our own army. His time was so taken up with finding
dachshund puppies for General Blank and locating people to cut the lawn for
Colonel So-and-so that he was hard put to administer the town.
I had a look at the jail which was well supplied with Nazis and suspects.
Then went on to the PW cage on the edge of town. We arrived at sunset and saw a
breathtaking panorama, 37,000 German, Hungarian, and other Axis prisoners
roaming in a caged area of about half a square mile. They certainly were not
coddled there. They slept on the bare ground with whatever covering they had
brought with them. They got two "C" rations a day and that was all. There was a
separate enclosure for officers where they were so tightly packed they had
barely room to lie

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down, and more trucks kept coming up every few minutes. Adjoining it was
another enclosure for about 500 German WACs and nonmedical personnel that were
surprisingly good looking on the whole. Fortunately for them the weather was
good and continued to be good for some time afterwards.
In command of the camp was a 1st Lt. of infantry with less than 300 men. The
boys looked a bit serious as they crouched behind their machine guns, for there
was only one strand of wire and no search lights for night time. Periodically
some Germans did try to get loose, but they were always cut down before they got
50 yards distance.

From Frankfurt, the historians drove to Weimar on the Autobahn, and Mason
found the trip a great pleasure "after bumping one's backside over the
incredibly rutted and ruined roads of France." Between Frankfurt and Weimar they
passed into the area in which Third Army had run out of trained military
government detachments, and they "sensed that something was amiss the moment we
hit Weimar":

The feeling of something being amiss was riot lessened by finding German
policemen in full uniform and carrying loaded carbines in front of the town
hall, where apparently military government of some kind was being set up.
Investigation revealed the reason. The acting Military Governor was a completely
untrained Lt. Col. of the field artillery who had been firing in the line 56
hours before.
Lt. Col. Billingsley, the officer in question, seemed infinitely relieved to
have trained military government officers suddenly appear, and he urgently
requested that I break our trip and lend a hand in setting up military
government in Weimar. This we did, among the first acts being to disarm the
police and bring him up to date on directives concerning displaced persons. It
appears that the whole area was under Lt. Col. Billingsley, and none of his
officers had the least grounding in the responsibility and powers of military
government.
Further to assist Lt. Col. Billingsley, Capt. Beesley and I undertook to visit
various detachments of his post in the surrounding country. In this connection
we visited Erfurt, Langensalza, Mulhaus, Apolda, and Jena. All of these cities,
with the exception of Apolda, had suffered from 25 to 40 percent damage. It
was interesting to observe the difference in the attitude of the inhabitants
in those towns which had been smashed and those which had not. Those in the
unhit towns were arrogant and hostile. Such was the condition of Apolda where
we found an artillery 1st Lieutenant and 40 men holding down a city of 70,000
normal population and at least 15,000 transients. Lt. Hurtz was doing a fine
job under the circumstances but lacked knowledge of his rights. When we told
him he was "Caesar" in that town, he was pleased and immediately issued
orders for the arrest of the Nazi mayor and equally Nazi police chief. He listened
attentively to all we said and when he realized his powers, he was a much happier
boy than lie had been a couple of hours earlier. Because of the attitude of
the inhabitants, we arranged to station a particularly hardboiled battalion
of infantry in that town.25

While Mason and Beesley were at Weimar, First Army's V Corps on 19 April took
Leipzig, the fourth largest city in Germany. To control the city, swollen by DPs
and refugees from its normal 700,000 population to over a million, the corps
designated Col. Jim Dan Hill, Commanding Officer, 190th Field Artillery Group,
as military commander of Leipzig and gave him three field artillery battalions,
four security guard detachments, and Provisional Military Government Detachment
A. Detachment A had sixteen officers and twenty-four enlisted men, but only two
of the officers had even a small amount of previous military government
experience. Hill and his troops entered Leipzig on the 19th while fighting was
still going on in the Napoleon Platz around the Battle of the Nations Monument,
which in its cav-

[243]

SCENE OF THE ATROCITY AT THEKLA

ernous stone base provided cover for a diehard German colonel and a company
or so of soldiers. Some sections of the city were destroyed. Other sections were
untouched, however, and in them the electric service continued without a break,
water service could be restored in a few days, and the streetcar system required
only minor repairs to wire and track. The Nazi Oberbuergermeister, his deputy,
and their families had committed suicide. Hill divided the city into three
military police zones and put a battalion in each zone; the Germans, however,
were not as much a threat to order as the Allied liaison officers who, he
complained, "tend to get emotional with the DPs and get them all stirred up."
His main difficulty with the Germans was getting them adjusted to doing common
labor. They had become accustomed to having foreign workers do the menial jobs.26

At Thekla, just outside Leipzig, V Corps uncovered a small concentration
camp. On the afternoon of the day before, the guards had herded over three
hundred inmates

[244]

into a wooden barracks building, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire
with thermite grenades. Those who ran from the building were shot. When the
Americans entered, the fire was still burning, and seventy-five bodies were
hanging on the concertina wire and electrically charged barbed wire surrounding
the camp. Somehow about a hundred had managed to escape to freedom. In
accordance with standing instructions from Eisenhower to make the Germans bury
atrocity victims in the most prominent and suitable spot in the nearest town,
military government ordered the newly appointed Leipzig Buergermeister to supply
seventy-five caskets and two hundred German civilians to dig the graves. The
site was the parkway along the main road into Leipzig's most beautiful cemetery,
the Suedfriedhof . The city also had to provide a cross and a wreath for each
grave, and all city officials and a hundred other prominent citizens were
required to attend the funeral. Three U.S. chaplains, representing the three
faiths, conducted the service. Several hundred DPs dropped flowers on the graves
as, a reporter noted, "did a few of the nearly 900 Germans who attended
voluntarily."
27

Mason and Beesley saw Leipzig the day after it was taken:
There were plenty of dead bodies and still burning houses in the suburbs. The
troops carried their arms in very handy positions. Rivers of prisoners were
driving out of Leipzig in supply trucks, going back empty to the railheads.
Leipzig was terribly smashed in the center but some of the suburbs seem to be in
pretty fair shape. The Buergermeister and the Oberbuergermeister committed suicide together with their families. We saw the latter group at the office-the
father, the mother, and a very pretty 18-year old daughter.
The police problem in a city of this size was of a special interest to me, so
we spent the bulk of our time with Colonel Green, Public Safety Officer on
Colonel Hill's staff. He had, of course, disarmed [the police] and required them
to wear uniform caps, trousers, and boots but with civilian coats. He said it
was necessary because so many trigger-happy "doughfeet" were loose and had shot
half a dozen of his men the day before thinking they were soldiers. The uniforms
were distinctly similar. Such police as remained were stolidly obeying orders
and arresting their previous bosses just as happily as they had political
victims a few days earlier.
Colonel Hill invited us to join him in listening to the nomination of a new
Buergermeister for Leipzig. It was a solemn bunch of Boche who
appeared. One thing they were very anxious to know-would the Russians gain
eventual possession of their city?
28

The two staff historians had, half seriously, hoped to end their trip in
Berlin. Mason, a World War I veteran, regarded this occasion as his second
attempt to get there, but he was disappointed again. Ninth Army was stopped on
the Elbe, not much more than a day's march from Berlin, but Eisenhower had
decided that the army would go no farther. When Mason and Beesley started hack
from Leipzig, they also missed what could have been the next best finale for
their trip, the American Soviet link-up on 25 April at Torgau on the Elbe River,
thirty miles east of Leipzig. A night stop at Muenden, north of Kassel, however,
produced a rare experience, a reasonably bona fide encounter with the Werwolf
organization:

That evening, Squadron Leader Gordon Freisen [the local military government
de-

[245]

tachment was British] . . . invited us to assist in the interrogation of a
pair of Hitler Jugend toughs caught with a notched pistol and a supply of
explosives near one of our bridges. Their attitude was typical, at first openly
defiant, then as hunger and fatigue began to work, more and more malleable. The
amusing thing about these youths and the Nazis we subsequently questioned was
their complete willingness to betray one another once they were convinced that a
friend had tattled, and it required very little persuasion to convince them that
they had been betrayed. To the disappointment of some of our men, it was quite
unnecessary to become physical in the interrogation.
As a result we organized a raiding party of four officers and six enlisted
men. We picked up three Nazis in possession of illegal arms. All of them lied
like troopers to start with, but invariably would lead us to where the weapons
were hidden-generally under the eaves of an outbuilding. It was very picturesque
because of the full moon and the light it threw from the helmets and weapons of
the men . . . .
We topped off the evening with a raid on an inn in the suburbs which had been
established as a sort of headquarters for the local "werewolves." One of the
Hitler youths had admitted that there were four female military personnel at the
inn, one of which was his sweety. He betrayed her quite cheerfully. The result
was, we swooped down on the inn and ransacked the place thoroughly. Among other
things, flushing a G.I. who was certainly qualified for the sixty-five dollar
question.29

The next day Mason and Beesley crossed into Luxembourg "where people smiled
and waved, and one could look at a pretty girl without having that sixty-five
dollars in the back of one's mind."

Seventh Army's primary mission during the first three weeks in April was to
cover the 12th Army Group's south flank. In doing so the army bore east and
slightly north across northern Baden and Wuerttemberg and into Bavaria. The German
defense on the Rhine had been weak, and at the end of March, Seventh Army held a
bridgehead that tied in with Third Army's on the north and reached south across
the Neckar River and embraced the cities of Mannheim and Heidelberg.

The pinpoint detachments were standing by. F1E2, under Lt. Col. Charles D.
Winning, moved into badly damaged Mannheim on 28 March, and I2E2, Capt. Albert
Haskell in command, took over in Heidelberg two days later. Having become
accustomed in the Rhineland to seeing nothing but flattened cities, the
Americans were surprised to find Heidelberg completely undamaged. The university
was intact, and the shops and banks stayed open while the city changed hands.
The Buergermeister and the city officials were at work, except for the
police chief who had disappeared along with the men of his force. The war had
not completely bypassed Heidelberg however. Its electric power came from
Mannheim, and until the lines and plants were repaired there would not be any,
nor would there be any water, because the pumps in the water system were
electric. The people, 24,000 more than the 86,000 peacetime population, looked
well fed, but the food situation was close to catastrophic. The whole municipal
reserve was one trainload of potatoes, flour, and canned beef fat that had
become stranded in the railroad yards after the bombing had cut all the rail
lines.30

East of Heidelberg, the Germans seemed determined again to show they had some
bite left in them. Heilbronn held out under bombing and artillery fire from 5 to
12

[246]

HEIDELBERG, MARCH 1945

April, and so many people were buried in the ruins "that Heilbronn
had a noticeable stench all during the summer of 1945."
31 At Nuremberg, eighty-five
miles farther east, the Germans put up a four-day fight, from 16 to 20 April,
that brought down a final wave of destruction on the already badly bombed old city-a wave which unfortunately hit the medieval relics much harder than it did
the banal structures in which the Nazis had staged their prewar party rallies.

Lt. Col. Delbert O. Fuller took Detachment E1B3, fifteen officers and ten
enlisted men, into Nuremberg on the 21st. The population was a third its normal
450,000. A hunt for the city officials turned up the Oberbuergermeister and the
Gauleiter of Franconia dead in the Gestapo headquarters. They had killed
themselves. Only a few city employees responded to the order to report for work
that was broadcasted by sound trucks. The police headquarters was demolished,
and nearly all the police were prisoners of war. Germans and DPs looted food
warehouses undeterred by the 225 streetcar conductors that the detach-

[247]

NUREMBERG, APRIL 1945

ment bad drafted as temporary police, and reports of rape and robbery by US
troops piled up on the public safety officer's desk. An MFA&A survey showed
that thirty-two of sixty-five listed artistic monuments had been totally demolished
and another eighteen badly damaged; fragments of valuable, centuries-old stonework
and sculpture mixed in with the rubble promised to make the clean-up job in
the city unusually long and painstaking.
32

The fight for Nuremberg was a last flicker in a dying war.
From the Rhine to the Elbe, Germany was subdued, and the staffs were polishing
the ECLIPSE plans. (See above, p. 163.) Although it could not begin as an
operation until either the Germans surrendered or Eisenhower declared them
defeated, ECLIPSE was already in effect as a condition for the greater part of
the SHAEF area in Germany.33 GOLDCUP (see above, p. 177) was ready, but that it could be put into
effect was becoming increasingly doubtful. The most recent planning had added to
GOLDCUP the SHAEF Special Echelon, 287 officers and

[248]

869 enlisted men, charged with making contact with the Soviet
element of the Control Council and beginning to set up the central Allied
authority for Germany; thus far, however, the Russians had not given any sign of
being willing to establish direct contacts. The Special Echelon's destination
was presumed to be Berlin, but as to how the force would get there, SHAEF could
only say, "It is . . . probable that the forces of SHAEF will only enter Berlin
on Soviet invitation, possibly as a result of negotiations at the governmental
level."
34The Ministerial Control Group, broken up into seventy control parties,
had a more promising future. SHAEF had attached ministerial control parties to
the T (Target ) Sub-Division, G-2, which was sending its own teams across
Germany behind the armies to gather scientific and industrial intelligence. When
the teams came upon documents or personnel of possible political value, they
called forward the appropriate ministerial control party. Experience was bearing
out, to a greater degree than had been expected, the assumption that the German
government would be dispersed outside Berlin. Bits and pieces of governmental
agencies were turning up in widely scattered locations, such as Army High
Command records in the Merkers mine and the cryptographic section of the Foreign
Ministry in a castle outside Leipzig. Most were valuable finds for various
reasons but, nevertheless, were only fragments, not the substance of government.35

On 22 April, Seventh Army and Third Army turned south into the area of the
redoubt. From the outset the operation had more the character of ECLIPSE than of OVERLORD. The Germans were finished and
neither in the condition nor in the mood to make a last ditch stand anywhere,
even in the mountain strongholds of Bavaria. Seventh Army's 10th Armored
Division took twenty-eight towns in a single day on 23 April. By the 27th, both
armies had crossed the Danube, and the cities of Ulm, Augsburg, and Regensburg
were in their hands. Where pinpoint detachments were available they generally
moved in on the same day as the combat troops. Ulm, for its size the most
heavily bombed city in the south, was a ruin. Water-filled bomb craters covered
blocks where factories and houses had once stood. The streets were rough paths
through the rubble. But the 500-year-old Gothic cathedral still stood, towering
above the flattened city around it.
36At Augsburg, a German civilian, Franz Hesse,
driving his own automobile, led the tanks of 3d Battalion, 15th Infantry,
through the roadblocks and into the city to receive the garrison commander's
surrender.37

Third Army's march took it across the border into Czechoslovakia, where,
being on liberated territory, military government again became civil affairs
but, as civil affairs, functioned more in the manner of military government
because the Sudeten Germans outnumbered the Czechs by ten to one. On entering
Czechoslovakia, Third Army encountered a new problem, German DPs. A quarter
million Silesian Germans fleeing the Russians took refuge in the U.S.-occupied
area before roadblocks were set up to stop them. They were in desperate straits,
having no place to turn for assis-

[249]

MASS FUNERAL for concentration camp prisoners murdered by their guards in the
last days of the war.

tance. Military government put some in camps and billeted others with the
Sudeten Germans and gave them subsistence from captured German rations.38At the Flossenburg
concentration camp, ten miles from the Czech border, 186 typhus cases raised the
threat of an epidemic, especially from the 16,000 prisoners that the SS guards
were marching south, ahead of the front. 26th Division G-5 kept track of the
exodus by the trail of bodies and hastily dug mass graves the prisoner columns
left behind.39

The Germans were conquered and their property was "liberated." Looting had
become something of an art. Soldiers stationed themselves outside military
government offices and intercepted civilians bringing in weapons. Tactical units
posted their own contraband lists in which they included items as various as
automobiles and jewelry, and the military government de-

[250]

GERMANS AND DPS CARRYING LOOT

tachments acquired a new and, for the most part, unwelcome function as tactical
commands and individual high-ranking officers requisitioned items of doubtful
military usefulness through them. The retreating Wehrmacht troops had
confiscated many bicycles and automobiles. The US troops took most of the rest.40In the last week of April SHAEF stopped accepting Reichsmark currency
for exchange into dollars because tremendous amounts dubiously acquired were
known to be in the hands of the troops.41

Since the US troops, German civilians, and DPs all looted, there was some debate
over whose behavior was the most reprehensible. In the DPS defense it was frequently
said that they took only food, clothing, and items for their own comfort. The
Americans could claim the sanction of military custom. But the Germans stole
from each other. On the other hand, the

[251]

urge to loot was shortest lived among the Germans, and the military
government detachments discovered that in their home communities the Germans
lacked the anonymity and mobility of the troops and the DPs and could often be
prevailed upon to return what they had taken. In Ansbach, the Landkreis food
officer put out an order demanding the return of all looted stocks and got back
more than he knew had been taken. In Bensheim, the German police chief recovered
a hundred tons of Wehrmacht supplies by hinting that he was about to begin
making arrests.42

Dachau, fifteen miles northwest of Munich, was the largest concentration camp
captured by US forces. Its rolls listed 65,000 prisoners-32,000 in the main
compound and the rest in satellite work camps. The Americans came on 29 April,
a Sunday. Work had stopped in the camp on Wednesday, and an evacuation was being
organized. One transport of 4,000 prisoners was able to get away, but the 42d
and 45th Infantry Divisions covered the forty miles from the Danube faster than
the Germans expected. At noon on Sunday the camp was quite, and the SS guards
were at their posts in the towers when the cry "Americans!" went up.
A prisoner rushed toward the gate, and a guard shot him. Outside, a single American
soldier stood looking casually at the towers while the guards eyed him and others
who were two or three hundred yards way. When the Americans opened fire, the
guards in the gate tower came down, hands in the air. One held a pistol behind
his back, and the first American shot him. In the next few minutes a jeep drove
up; in it were a blond woman war correspondent and a chaplain. The chaplain
asked the prisoners, now crowding to the gate, to join him in the Lord's Prayer.43

Dachau, dating back to 1933, was among the first concentration camps set up
in Germany and the only one with an unbroken existence through the whole Nazi
period. It had all the appurtenances : the motto over the gate (Arbeit macht
Frei, Work Liberates) , the electrically charged barbed wire fence, the gas
chamber, the crematorium, the starved prisoners, and the presence of death in
the form of human bodies piled like logs. Bad as it was, the prisoners
considered Dachau to be superior to hard labor camps like Ohrdruf and vastly
superior to death camps like Mauthausen.44Most Americans found such distinctions
hard to comprehend but not those who also saw Mauthausen when it was uncovered a
week later.45

Seventh Army G-5 had prepared for Dachau. On the morning after liberation two
batteries of the 601st Field Artillery, three truckloads of food and medical
supplies, and a public address sound truck arrived. Col. Kenneth E. Worthing,
G-5, XV Corps, took command, and Detachment I13G3 assumed military government
responsibility for the camp and the city of Dachau. The 3,500 bodies stacked in
several places inside the compound were left until after a war crimes
investigation team made its survey. On the third day, two 400-bed evacuation
hospitals, the 116th and 127th, moved in. The prisoners' daily

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rations, 600 calories each when the Americans arrived, was
raised immediately to 1,200 and within two weeks to 2,400 calories.46

The small city of Dachau was, in a way, more of a discovery for the Americans
than the camp itself. It had existed side by side with the camp for twelve
years. The tracks on which trains brought in prisoners and carloads of corpses
for the crematorium ran through the city along the Nibelungen Strasse, and the
guards frequently marched prisoner work details through the streets. Asked
whether they realized that in the last three months at least 13,000 people had
lost their lives barely a stone's throw from them, the citizens of Dachau
claimed shock and surprise and answered, "Was koenntenwir tun?" (What could we
do?) . Asked whether they had seen the prisoners come in on the railroad, they
insisted that the trains all came at night and that the cars were sealed. The
camp had brought prosperity to Dachau, and many had profited directly from it.
Those who had not benefited were more willing to talk. They said that people
knew what was going on and were disturbed by it but had been afraid to say
anything for fear of economic retaliation and even more afraid to do anything
because the shadow of the camp also hung over them. Seventh Army G-2 reached,
for the time, a remarkably charitable conclusion:

No citizen of Dachau is without a deep sense that something was wrong,
terribly wrong, on the outskirts of their town. Those who really did not give a
damn were few.
Those who did show opposition should be honored. But it
should be pointed out in justice to the others that they were people who could
seclude themselves from the community without harming their sources of income.47

Troops of the 42d and 45th Divisions who liberated Dachau in the afternoon
on 29 April were fighting in Munich the next morning and by nightfall had, along
with XV Corps' other three divisions, captured the city that was the capital
of Bavaria and the birthplace of nazism. Not an industrial center, its association
with nazism had, nevertheless, made Munich a target for air attacks, and in
the end 80 percent of the city was damaged or destroyed. The Munich military
government detachment, F1F3, under Lt. Col. Eugene Keller, arrived in the morning
on the 30th. As befitted a pinpoint detachment with a year's training for its
assignment, the 52-man truck and jeep column drove straight to the Marienplatz
and wheeled to a stop before the city hall. A few apprehensive Germans, selected
from "white lists" of non-Nazis and anti-Nazis and notified to be
present, were waiting at the entrance. Keller told one to act as temporary Buergermeister.
Some detachment officers went out in their jeeps to inspect the water, gas,
sewage, and electric plants. Others inspected the police and fire departments,
interviewed the leading Catholic and Lutheran clergy, or questioned educators
and welfare workers. The banks were closed and the newspaper offices and radio
stations seized. Sound trucks broadcasted instructions and essential world news
to the population. The smart and efficient performance of the detachment was
marred by only one hitch. It was one that almost all the detachments were experiencing
: the

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MARIENPLATZ, MUNICH. On the left, the city hall.

tactical units habitually dumped their prisoners of war on the nearest
military government office's doorstep. For the first week, the members of F1F3 shared their quarters in the city hall with a disconsolate and confused
collection of prisoners.

As the cradle of nazism, Munich had been slated for especially rigorous
military government, lout the city from the outset proved to be as tractable as
any other in Germany. In fact, Munich could claim something that the Americans
had not found anywhere else in Germany, an active anti-Nazi resistance. Two
underground groups, the Freiheitsaktion Bayern and the Bayerische Hilfspolizei
0-7, had staged an uprising two days before the U.S. troops arrived. Although
they had not been overwhelmingly successful against the Nazis even at that late
date, they were more than willing to relieve the Americans of the burden of
running the city. After accepting a number of their nominees for appointments,
however, military government learned that anti-Nazis could in some ways be as
troublesome to handle as Nazis.48

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MUNICH'S MAIN RAILROAD STATION, MAY 1945

The redoubt, if it existed, was expected to lie in the mountains south of
Munich, probably centered on Hitler's vacation retreat at~ Berchtesgaden. To a
degree, this estimate was correct. In mid-March, Hitler had belatedly given
orders to set up a fortress in the mountains, and Since then trainloads of goods
and material had been funneled by the hundreds into southern Germany- -partly
because they had nowhere else to go. At war's end there were over 8,000
locomotives south of the Main River, twice the number ordinarily operating
there. Loaded boxcars blocking the ramps and stations had contributed to the
railroad breakdown. The Munich division of the Reichsbahn had a 14,000-car jam that
was not fully unsnarled as late as June 1945.
49 The buildup, such as it was, had
centered at Berchtesgaden where Hitler had contemplated establishing his
headquarters if he was driven out of Berlin. He had spent several months each
year during the war in his retreat on the Obersalzberg and had a communications
center nearby that was

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as good as the one the Army maintained for him at Zossen outside Berlin. On
the night of Hitler's birthday, 20 April, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering,
assorted lesser Nazi big shots, and sections of the armed forces, army, and air
force staffs had moved to Berchtesgaden expecting Hitler to follow in a few
days, since the Russians had by then almost encircled Berlin. Thousands of
laborers had worked day and night for a month building fortifications, and
weapons, ammunition, and food had rolled in as fast as the railroad marshalling
yards could handle them. It was all wasted effort however. Hitler decided to end
his career in Berlin, and in twenty minutes, beginning at noon on 25 April,
Allied bombers smashed the fortifications. After the bombing, the erstwhile
defenders of the redoubt headed south looking for refuge in the Austrian Tyrol.

Goering, whom Hitler had at the end stripped of all his titles and offices
including that of Reich Game Keeper, emerged from the mountains some days later
to return briefly to the limelight as a figure in the most publicized
fraternization incident of the war. He surrendered -by arrangement- on a country
road to Brig. Gen. Robert Stack, Assistant Division Commander, 36th Infantry
Division, who was photographed shaking hands with him. At the division
headquarters, the press reported, the division commander, Maj. Gen. John E. Dahlquist, interviewed Goering in
private, gave him time to bathe and to change his uniform, ate chicken with him
at lunch, and provided him and his wife with a night's lodging in a castle.50

On the morning of 4 May, when US 3d Infantry Division troops crossed into Landkreis
Berchtesgaden, the Landrat, Emil Jacob, was the most important official
left. Even the local party leaders, the Kreisleiter and the Ortsgruppenleiter,
had taken to the mountains. At two o'clock in the afternoon, Jacob drove in
his car to meet the Americans and surrender the town. Detachment I3G3, under
Capt. R. A. Bryand, arrived the next morning and suffered the only casualties
known to have been incurred in Berchtesgaden, two men injured when a time bomb
exploded in one of the Kreis headquarters offices.
51 Berchtesgaden would have been just a small town with some fine
scenery had it not been for two reminders of the past: the Adlerhorst, Hitler's
elaborate guest house on the Kehlstein, reached by an elevator run through a
400-foot copper-lined tunnel in the mountain; and the Berghof, Hitler's home
on the Obersalzberg, now bombed, burned, and looted -an appropriate monument
to the Third Reich.